We observed that the sharp fall in the bond markets Thursday, which was triggered not by news, but by a collective recognition that credit was too cheap, seemed to many to be an inflection point, an end of a long cycle of falling interest rates. This development is important not just for fixed income investors, […]
Read more...If a terrorist were to blow up Moodys, S&P, and Fitch, it would have a devastating impact on the financial markets. Rating agencies play a indispensable role in the debt arena. Many investors are required to consider bond ratings in their investment decision making process. Insurance companies, for example, are required to hold either all […]
Read more...This post from Conglomerate (a blog I generally like) is an articulate rendition of an appallingly conventional line of thinking: This Sunday’s Washington Post featured a story on the increase in socially responsible investing over the last decade…. According to the Washington Post, over the past decade the number of socially responsible investment funds has […]
Read more...Felix Salmon thinks so: Sitting on the property panel with Bob Toll was Steven Green, of Greenstreet Partners. He had a very good explanation for the run-up in US property values in recent years: financial derivatives. “People always told you that there was no liquidity in real estate,” said Green. “And now the financial derivatives […]
Read more...It’s one thing when people who have little to no experience in the financial markets worry about the risks posed by derivatives and other innovative financial products. It’s quite another when a concerned individual also happens to have been deeply involved in risk management at major Wall Street firms. The financial markets insider is Richard […]
Read more...A Financial Times story tells us that Japan is contemplating creating a special state investment fund that would be an active manager, along the lines of Singapore’s Temasek. If it comes to fruition, this development would be a major shift, since it would be far and away the biggest and most influential fund of that […]
Read more...Ha. We were suspicious in back in 2005 when Edhec-Risk, an asset management research company, issued a report, “Hedge fund industry: is there a capacity effect?” which examined whether various hedge fund strategies were becoming too crowded for the managers for the managers to earn excess returns. And excess return (meaning earning more than the […]
Read more...As we’ve pointed out, if one is the worrying sort, hedge funds give plenty of reason to concentrate the mind. It’s not just that they are highly leveraged, unregulated, big, and getting bigger. The Fed has also admitted it doesn’t know what they are up to, which means their reassurances aren’t fact based (how can […]
Read more...Supposedly, the reason that sophisticated investors like pension funds and endowments pay 2% management fees and 20% upside fees (and sometimes more) to hedge funds and private equity funds (and higher-than-index-fund fees for long equity managers) is that they are buying “alpha,” which is the manager’s ability to beat the relevant market. (To be more […]
Read more...Harvard is famous for attracting the best and the brightest, particularly in its own fund management operations (its endowment is currently over $22 billion). Mohamed El-Erian, the president and CEO of Harvard Management Company and a Harvard Business School faculty member, made these observations today in a Financial Times article, “Complex finance and the brave […]
Read more...I confess to being late in getting around to the announcement by MSCI Barra, which was reported on January 12 in Global Pensions, of their intention to add 20,000 indices in the coming months, which would bring the total to over 100,000: Global index provider MSCI Barra will be launching some 20,000 new indices over […]
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